Big_Belgian
Well-Known Member
I brewed a big brown ale about a month ago - essentially the "Janet's Brown Ale" recipe from Jamil's book, but tweaked a bit with some brown sugar to bump it up a bit to 1.078 OG. I used Wyeast 1450 (1L starter) and kept it in the mid-upper 60's. It fermented well down to about 1.024, then stopped after about 2 weeks. That's a fair bit higher than my goal, which was 1.018 (using Hopville software), and the samples tasted very sweet, cloying. I added some yeast energizer and a bit more sugar a week ago and it dropped to about 1.021. I will probably bottle it as is, and I think it will be a good beer, but during the course of the past couple weeks I had a thought that I would like some input on.
If the beer had stopped completely at 1.024 and I felt that was just too sweet for what I wanted, would it be a viable strategy to rack to secondary, add a Wyeast Brett strain (5112 or 5526) and put it away for a year? I would then be going for a sour/brett type brown ale. Wyeast states that the attenuation for its Brett strains is "very high", so I wonder if that yeast would be able to do something with the remaining fermentables after the 1450 had petered out in the mid 20's. I doubt I'll try this for this batch, but am really curious if this is a reasonable approach to rescue a beer that, for whatever reason, has not fully attenuated.
thanks
If the beer had stopped completely at 1.024 and I felt that was just too sweet for what I wanted, would it be a viable strategy to rack to secondary, add a Wyeast Brett strain (5112 or 5526) and put it away for a year? I would then be going for a sour/brett type brown ale. Wyeast states that the attenuation for its Brett strains is "very high", so I wonder if that yeast would be able to do something with the remaining fermentables after the 1450 had petered out in the mid 20's. I doubt I'll try this for this batch, but am really curious if this is a reasonable approach to rescue a beer that, for whatever reason, has not fully attenuated.
thanks